NATIONAL ACADEMY BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS VOL. VII 



which has been acquired, one of the students asked whether 

 such a view was not contrary to religious teaching. Professor 

 Brooks at once replied : "As I remember it, St. Paul teaches 

 that death was not an original corollary of life, for he says 'by 

 sin came death.' " 



His nature and cast of mind was strongly reverential, and 

 he could be said to be religious in the higher sense, although 

 he long ago ceased to attend church or to take any interest in 

 the doings or affairs of religious bodies. A few years before 

 his death he talked with the writer upon the subject of immor- 

 tality, and maintained that faith in immortality was in no sense 

 unscientific. His attitude on these things may be inferred 

 from the following extracts from the "Foundations of Zool- 

 ogy": 



If any believe they have evidence of a power outside nature to which 

 both its origin and its maintenance from day to day are due, physical 

 science tells them nothing inconsistent with this belief. If failure to 

 find any sustaining virtue in matter and motion is evidence of an ex- 

 ternal sustaining power, physical science affords this evidence; but no 

 one who admits this can hope to escape calumny; although it seems 

 clear that the man of science is right, . . . for refusing to admit 

 that he knows the laws of physical nature in any way except as observed 

 order. 



Many will, no doubt, receive with incredulity the assertion that the 

 ultimate establishment of mechanical conceptions of life has no bearing, 

 either positively or negatively, upon the validity of such beliefs as the 

 doctrine of immortality, for example. The opinion that life may be 

 deducible from the properties of protoplasm has, by almost universal 

 consent, been held to involve the admission that the destruction of the 

 living organism is, of necessity, the annihilation of life. Yet it seems 

 clear that this deduction is utterly baseless and unscientific; ... if 

 it be admitted that we find in nature no reason why events should occur 

 together except the fact that they do, is it not clear that we can give no 

 reason why life and protoplasm should be associated except the fact that 

 they are? And is it not equally clear that this is no reason why they 

 may not exist separately? 



During his first years at the Johns Hopkins University he 

 and other members of the biological department boarded at 

 "Brightside," on the shore of Lake Roland, seven miles from 

 Baltimore. Here he met his future wife, Amelia Katharine 

 Schultz, to whom he was married June 13, 1878. In after 

 years Mrs. Posey, owner of "Brightside," bequeathed this 



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